A pipeline is a collection of jobs that brings the software from version control into the hands of the end-users by using automation tools. It is a feature used to incorporate continuous delivery in our software development workflow.
Over the years, there have been multiple Jenkins pipeline releases including, Jenkins Build flow, Jenkins Build Pipeline plugin, Jenkins Workflow, etc. What are the key features of these plugins?
They represent multiple Jenkins jobs as one whole workflow in the form of a pipeline.
What do these pipelines do? These pipelines are a collection of Jenkins jobs that trigger each other in a specified sequence.
Let me explain this with an example. Suppose I’m developing a small application on Jenkins and I want to build, test and deploy it. To do this, I will allot 3 jobs to perform each process. So, job1 would be for a build, job2 would perform tests, and job3 for deployment. I can use the Jenkins build pipeline plugin to perform this task. After creating three jobs and chaining them in a sequence, the build plugin will run these jobs as a pipeline.
Hope this helps!